I find myself flying to New York on Monday for some dealnews related business. Anytime I travel I try and find something fun to do at night. (Watching a movie by myself in Provo, Utah was kinda not that fun.) So, this week I asked on Twitter if anything was happening while I would be in town. Anything would do. A meetup of PHP/MySQL users or some design/css/js related stuff for example. Pretty much anything interesting. Well, later that day I received an IM from the brilliant John Allspaw, Senior VP of Technical Operations at Etsy. He wanted me to swing by the Etsy offices and say hi. Turns out it is only a block away from where I would be. Awesome! He also mentioned that he would like to have me come and speak at their offices some time. That would be neat too. I will have to plan better next time I am traveling up there.

Fast forward another day. I get an email from Kellan Elliott-McCrea, CTO of Etsy wanting to know if I would come to the Etsy offices and talk about Gearman. At first I thought "That is short notice, man. I don't know that I can pull that off." Then I remembered the last time I was asked to speak at an event on short notice based off a recommendation from John Allspaw.

It was in 2008 for some new conference called Velocity. That only turned out to be the best conference I have ever attended. I have been to Velocity every year since and this year took our whole team. In addition, I spoke again in 2009 at Velocity, wrote a chapter for John's book Web Operations that was released at Velocity in 2010 and was invited to take part in the Velocity Summit this year (2011) which helps kick off the planning for the actual conference. The moral of that story for me is: when John Allspaw wants you to take part in something, you do it.

In reality, it was not that tough a decision. Even without John's involvement, I love the chance to talk about geeky stuff. The Etsy and dealnews engineering teams are like two twins separated at birth. Every time we compare notes, we are doing the same stuff. For example, we have been trading Open Source code lately. They are using my GearmanManager and we just started using their statistics collection daemon, statsd. So, speaking to their people about what we do seem like a great opportunity to share and get input.

The event is open to the public. So, if you use Gearman, want to use Gearman, or just want to hear how we use Gearman at dealnews, come here me ramble on about how awesome it is Tuesday night in Dumbo at Etsy Labs. You can RSVP on the event page.

Best Practices for Gearman by Brian Moon
Etsy Labs
55 Washington St. Ste 712
NY 11222

Tuesday, August 09, 2011 from 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM (ET)